Jane Fonda Has Always Been on the Move—and She Has No Plans to Slow Down Now

Jane Fonda is fuming. Seething. It’s late morning, and she’s sitting in the kitchen of her Beverly Hills condo in a white baseball cap, sunglasses, and fancy sweats. Her dog, a fluffy coton de Tuléar named Tulea, is also in an agitated state, scampering in circles on the tile floor. Fonda, 79, jabs a finger toward a garbage can as explanation. It’s the trash container’s fault?

I’m almost 80, so to say that I’ve never experienced this kind of nightmare before in my life is saying something.

Not quite. Stuffed inside is her morning New York Times, with front page articles about President Trump’s ad-libbed “fire and fury” threat toward North Korea. “I’m almost 80, and so to say that I’ve never experienced this kind of nightmare before in my life is saying something,” she tells me, fidgeting anxiously. We talk about Trump for a few minutes—let her get it out of her system, I figure—before I gently try to steer the conversation toward her latest career resurgence.

“Who gives a rat’s ass?” she says. My eyes widen. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that, with everything going on in the world, our country, it’s really hard to talk about myself or entertainment right now.”

After 57 years in show business (not counting a childhood spent in the limelight as the daughter of Henry Fonda), she is still working nonstop, starring in the hit Netflix series Grace and Frankie and teaming with Robert Redford for this fall’s romantic drama Our Souls at Night, which won the duo Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement at the recent Venice Film Festival. Coming up next for Fonda is Book Club, co-starring Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen. The four play longtime friends whose lives are jolted after they read the raunchy Fifty Shades of Grey. (In August a photo of the actresses taking a break from filming to watch the solar eclipse went viral.)

After such a full life—Fonda has been a two-time Oscar winner, mother, political activist, fitness queen, book author, blogger, wife to three dramatically different men—what keeps this iconoclast going?

“I’m a slow learner and a late starter,” she says drily.

I became an activist in 1970. And if I can give any advice it’s this: We mustn’t normalize this presidency.

As I prod her, the conversation takes hairpin turns. One minute she’s telling me about her teenage granddaughter Viva, who is curled up on a sofa in the next room, watching an episode of Parks and Recreation on an iPad. (Viva is the daughter of Vanessa Vadim, Fonda’s daughter from her marriage to the French filmmaker Roger Vadim.) A moment later Fonda, whose life and its many acts were recently examined on the third season of You Must Remember This, a popular podcast about Hollywood, is ranting anew about Trump. (“I became an activist in 1970,” she says. “And if I can give any advice it’s this: We mustn’t normalize this presidency.”)

Then suddenly we’re talking about her family again, including her emotionally distant father, whose acting in films like The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men made him one of Hollywood’s superstars, and an effervescent cousin on her mother’s side, the Standard Oil heiress and fashion innovator Millicent Rogers, who died in 1953. “I think out there in the cosmos she is one of my elders who is beckoning to me,” Fonda says as we sit at her little kitchen table. “Millicent looks after me.”

Jane Fonda with her father Henry in 1963.

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By the end of our time together, having tackled some emotional topics, we are both wiping away tears—Fonda from behind those sunglasses, which she never takes off. “The way I figure, the way to live, especially in the latter part of your life, is to envision how you want to die,” she says. “I think we all would like it to be in bed, surrounded by family and loved ones. To get there you have to work hard to heal the wounds and mend the fences. Because in the end it’s always what you didn’t do, not what you did.”

She continues, “I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of getting to the end without becoming the best I can be as a person. I think it’s why I never was able to stay with a husband. I just always saw that it could get better. That sounds terrible. I wouldn’t want to erase any of them. But they all seem like stepping stones.”

Robert Redford has known Fonda since 1966, when they co-starred in The Chase, a Southern crime drama. They teamed up again the following year in Barefoot in the Park, which gave both their first smash hit, and then in the 1979 romantic comedy The Electric Horseman. They have remained friends ever since, finding shared ground over environmental causes and a mutual distaste for the phoniness of Hollywood.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of getting to the end without becoming the best I can be as a person. I think it’s why I never was able to stay with a husband. I just always saw that it could get better.

Redford was actually the one who suggested that they reunite onscreen in Our Souls at Night, which arrived on Netflix in late September. So I call him a couple of days before I’m to meet Fonda and ask him, as a guy who knows a thing or two about longevity in Hollywood, to explain hers. “Jane is a force, no other way to put it,” he tells me. “She’s always looking forward, and I think that has allowed her to live without too many scars.”

Fonda shakes her head when I tell her this. “At this point I’m nothing but scars!” She laughs loud enough that the now-dozing Tulea opens one eye. Many of those wounds, however fully healed, involve her family.

Fonda and Redford promoting their 1967 film Barefoot in the Park.

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Earlier I made an offhand remark about her being part of a Hollywood dynasty, referring to her dad (at the 1982 Academy Awards, when he won best actor for On Golden Pond, she accepted on his behalf); her brother Peter Fonda (Easy Rider); and her niece Bridget Fonda (Single White Female). She responded by saying, “That’s just a media invention—not real.” When she was talking about her granddaughter, I asked how she would describe her family: Tight? Not tight? She looked a little grim and said, “Not tight.”

At the moment, Fonda says, she is very close to her son, the actor Troy Garity, who lives in Los Angeles and recently played a recurring role on HBO’s Ballers. Garity’s father, the late social activist and politician Tom Hayden, was Fonda’s second husband. (Her third marriage was to the media mogul Ted Turner. And earlier this year she split with her longtime post-Turner partner, the record producer Richard Perry.) Fonda is also close to her adopted daughter Mary Luana Williams, who goes by Lulu. “I haven’t always been a great parent,” Fonda says. “I did the best I could, and I’ve tried to learn what better would have looked like, and I try to do that now.”

I ask about her own parents, in particular her chilly father, with whom she had a strained relationship, especially as a young woman. (Her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, a vivacious woman who lived in an immense Fifth Avenue mansion while married to her first husband, the millionaire George Brokaw, suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide when Fonda was 12.)

“You have to learn as much as you can about your parents,” Fonda says. “Learn about them as people: Why was this person the way he was? After that you will realize that their treatment of you—as a child, as an adult—had nothing to do with you. If they had a problem loving you, it was because they didn’t know how.” She offers a brittle smile.

Fonda with her father at the Golden Globes in 1979.

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“I miss him so much,” she says of her father, who died in 1982. “I think I’d be able to talk to him now, which was something I had a hard time doing when he was alive; I was too intimidated by him. There’s so much that I wasn’t able to say.” Like what? “I don’t want to go into it,” she says.

There’s a lot of time behind me and not much time ahead of me. And whatever time is left, I want to do it differently.

Sensing that I’m on thin ice, I switch the topic to her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, which I have been reading in preparation for our meeting. The book is fascinating, and not just because Fonda talks candidly about everything from her decades-long battle with bulimia to her discovering that Turner was having an affair and bludgeoning him with a car phone. The book makes you realize just what a chameleon she has been over the years: sex kitten in the 1960s (Barbarella), political piñata following her 1972 visit to Vietnam, ’80s aerobics authority, retired ranchwoman in the ’90s, born-again Christian and women’s rights advocate in the ’00s. “Standing pat just isn’t in my nature,” she tells me. Clearly.

Fonda writes a lot about self-discovery in My Life So Far, which stretches to more than 600 pages. It’s a book, she says in the introduction, about a woman who finally realized that “she didn’t need to be perfect, that good enough was good enough.” For some reason I overshare and tell her that that line hit me on a personal level. “You have no idea how many men have told me that,” she says. “I always assumed it was mostly true for women, this feeling that you have to live up to other people’s standards. And what I found out was that many men feel exactly that way.” It’s the start of a soliloquy that makes us both teary.

“Perfect?” she says. “It doesn’t exist. What matters is that you’re whole. I felt so much of my life that I was two people. There was this person everyone saw, and there was another person who lived outside of me, alongside me, who had been delegated all of the imperfect stuff. To become whole, you reach around and pull all those shadows in and they join your light—you put it all together inside your skin. And you accept that, yes, I’m flawed, but my intentions are good, and I will never be perfect, but I will continue to evolve toward that.”

Perfect? It doesn’t exist. What matters is that you’re whole.

Personal evolution, she adds, is one reason she connected with Addie, her character in Our Souls at Night. The film, adapted from Kent Haruf’s best-selling book, is about a widow who, wearing grandma jeans and a floral blouse, knocks on her widower neighbor’s door one day and bluntly suggests they start sleeping together—not for sex (at first) but for companionship. “I’m lonely, and I’m guessing you might be too,” Fonda’s character says.

The film is interesting for a number of reasons, one being that romantic movies about anyone over the age of 30 are almost nonexistent. “There’s very little made for older audiences,” Redford says. “And I hope people will relate to the theme, as Jane and I did: When you think all is said and done, you find another chance for growth.” Also, it’s just fun to see Fonda and Redford reunite onscreen after 38 years.

“They have always been quite good together, and they bring such instant credibility,” says Jeanine Basinger, author of The Star Machine and founder of Wesleyan University’s film studies program. “In a Hollywood where everything is shifting, what hasn’t is the definition of stardom that they represent.”

For Fonda, Our Souls at Night is a meaningful movie, but not a milestone. It’s certainly not Klute, the 1971 crime thriller that she says is the film that best epitomizes her career; her risky, Oscar-winning portrayal of a troubled New York sex worker is still startling. She would have been happier with Our Souls at Night, truth be told, if there had been an actual sex scene instead of just kissing and the implication of more. “It really upsets me,” she says. But she does think Addie is worthy of joining the Fonda pantheon.

“I love her attitude, maybe because I share it myself,” she says. “And the attitude is this: ‘Look, there’s a lot of time behind me and not much time ahead of me. And whatever time is left, I want to do it differently. I feel scared to be by myself at night. And I’m going to do something about it.’ ” She smiled. “I totally relate to all of that.”

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